A good friend sent me the below a few weeks ago, which I'm passing along to you now not only because the story is AMAZING, but also because his mix is equally stunning and I've been listening to it every day non-stop for the past few weeks.
Enjoy!
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Stevarino Date: Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 7:22 PM Subject: summer jamz and some asshole named vince True Story:
I'm drinking at an outdoor table in front of a bar on Clinton St. late Monday night. Suddenly the table starts shaking. It jumps up once, then twice, then completely flies over spilling drinks, breaking candles. A head emerges out of the ground, and then a body proceeds to crawl out of the mess and onto the sidewalk. Turns out we were drinking on top of one of those metal trapdoor contraptions that let you into the basement of a restaurant. Dude crawls out of the basement, and begins to introduce himself to people, shaking their hands and bowing like a gentleman, slurring "Hey, I'm Vince."
This guy was obviously wasted, and looked like he was locked in there for a while. His pupils were the size of dinner plates. Eventually he sat down and I offered him a smoke, in response to which he looked at me cockeyed, stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth and tried to kick me in the shin. Someone snaps a picture of him. He refused to tell us how he got underground and eventually stumbled away. This girl comes over to me from inside, sits down and asks:
"You know that guy?" "Who, Vince?" I say. "Fuck no."
Just a brief photo update on the craziness from last week that EK and I attended, which, again, was from this show, Melanie Bonajo's "As Thrown Down From Heaven". I thought it was just going to be a photo exhibition, but, while there were indeed MB photos, it turned out to be some totally mental and insane performance art.
This first photo, taken on my iPhone, shows the beginning of the show where Melanie, in tie-dyed onesie, gave the crowd a warm-up during some technical difficulties by singing a Whitney Houston-esque ballad. She then told us that the show was ready to begin, which meant she began bleating crazed, guttural scream-vocals over a tribal-hardcore techno beat until the collapsed on the floor in a heap.
At this point EK and I decided to leave but as we headed into the hallway we saw this train of people we realized were "performers" and it became immediately obvious that we needed to go back inside:
Little known fact: pans work just as well as underwear at protecting yr junk, and also keep out unwanted visitors.
Ummmmmmmmm... Yes. Your eyes are not deceiving you: that is indeed a naked woman with household objects--including a chair, lamp, and broom--tied to her body and a bucket on her head. What. The. Fuck. ...? And you can't tell from the photo but there were three other equally crazily dressed people standing with these two; obviously, I was mesmerized.
A moment after snapping this photo, these folk then walked into the gallery and upon exchanging, "We can't not go back in, right?" glances, EK and I followed them inside.
Thankfully at this point, EK pulled out and handed to me her nice point-and-shoot so I could take some shots above the standard crap-level of the iphone camera.
It was really crowded and the crazy people had left me momentarily stunned, so I'm not entirely sure how Melanie made it from the front room with the mic to this next room, but when we arrived inside the room, the scene looked something like this:
Yes. A full on altar on the ground like something out of Twin Peaks' Black Lodge. The five performers were kneeling on the ground around Melanie performing what appeared to be funeral rites, until after a moment the fifth (and, incidentally only semi-normally dressed) person got up and began floating around the room blowing sage incense on people.
She was then followed by the other naked girl, this one clothed only in a red hat pulled down entirely over her face but cut out on top so that her long dark hair came out. The "hat" had long, blobular tassle-like pieces that on some tiny level covered parts of her upper body, but she was largely exposed to the elements and looking mega crazy. All of which you can see in this next photo:
Our naked friend then began looking even crazier as she commenced "dancing" across the room, locomoting in a semi-rhythmic too-nuts-for-modern-dance motion that consisted of graceful bodily improvisation alternating with primal body-grunt thrusts. This resulted in her frequently landing on the floor with a bang, including in the above photo, in which she fell upon a pile of dirt at my feet.
Of the other three fairies, the furniture-bound naked one continued with the funeral rites, while the other female seemed to disappear (at least from my view) from sight. The last "performer", a large terrifying-looking man wearing an adult-sized pink Care Bears costume (complete with bear-eared hood) then stood up and walked over toward me. Picking up a shovel along the way, he began scooping up dirt from the pile at my feet and placing it on another part of the floor nearby. After 5 or 6 scoop dumps, he then began scooping up dirt and carrying it back to the altar where he dumped it on Melanie's stomach.
Every single minute and movement of this was blowing our minds and EK and I continually looked back at one another mouthing "Seriously?!?! What the fuck!??!". Finally, after about 20 minutes of nonsense, all five fairies rejoined Melanie in the center circle (the disappeared one appearing from nowhere crawling on all paws) for the conclusion, which you can see here:
This may look like same photo as the one above but it isn't.
I don't remember exactly what happened to end things but basically they started humming and then finally collapsed forward and the music stopped. I'm sure by then many people were just wondering when it would be over, but I couldn't keep my eyes off the Care Bear's foot, which was so close to the candles that I expected his costume to ignite at any minute (see photo above).
And then a minute later it was over and all six performers immediately filed out of the room to who knows where.
So, all in all: keeping real, keeping it crazy, keeping it Beaumont.
It is 11:45 pm right now and in exactly four hours I need to be at Penn Station to check-in and board a train for Babylon, Long Island, from whence Mike D and I shall ride forth on our 100 mile bike journey to Montauk.
Which means that in only three hours and thirty minutes I need to get on my bike and leave my house--at an hour that many of my friends will surely still be out and about from their Saturday night festivities. I am about to hit the hay for an attempt at 2:45 of sleep, but I am incredibly excited. Despite the calls for rain most of the morning--please! please! pray for me!--I have a good feeling about tomorrow. Here we go.
I have been listening to the Hercules and Love Affair album constantly, nonstop and back-to-back. I think that I actually listened to the entire album four times in a row while working late last night.
Since when did this become what I do? Because now it appears to be who I am.
Ask any average Italian what pops into their head when they think of Naples, and you’ll almost assuredly get the same three things every time: pizza, garbage in the streets, and the most powerful international crime syndicate in the world—the Camorra. Does that sound bombastic? Well, this is an organization that in the past 30 years rose to be valued at around one-tenth of the aggregated wealth of the Italian nation. It is a mafia that deals in illegal activities, such as drugs and weapons trafficking, contraband, and extortion, and additionally controls a huge amount of legal, straight businesses in pretty much any economic sphere in which they find an opportunity to invest. It is in this reality that a very distinctive genre of music rose to prominence over the last two decades.
Neomelodic music is a strange mixture of techno, pop, Latin American music, and traditional Neapolitan love songs, an entirely singular and totally bizarre form of music that, critics say, is generally performed by nothing more than ex-criminals who became Camorra minstrels.
The army of Neomelodic singers (ranging in age from eight to 80) tell stories of love found and lost, of the crime that surrounds them, of dreams of success and escape, and of running away from the law, all in the Neapolitan dialect—a very different language from “normal” Italian. The songs are 100 percent cheesy and melodic—not to mention melodramatic—but at the same time they’re incredibly funny. They tell stories that resonate with their audience much more than any other musical genre can (yes, we’re looking at you, American rap circa 2009).
I have now made my way through five of the ten episodes and I have to say: wow. These performers may play 600-700 shows in a single year--imagine a breakneck SXSW pace upheld for an entire year, in perpetuity--and demonstrate a FJM-esque devotion of grit to their trade. In this time of increasing globalization and fading of regional identity in pop culture, particularly in Europe and North America, I implore you all to check these videos out, as they tell a story so particularly and spectacularly "at home" that it's both mindblowing and heartening.
Below is Episode 1, which you should start with, but make sure to check out parts two-nine here.
Friend: good god. i just rode to coney island and back via east new york JeffreyBeaumont: that's wonderful, what i like to hear Friend: i was on my way to barnes and noble to buy a bible and something snapped JeffreyBeaumont: you went to coney island to find a barnes and noble? Friend: no i was on my way to fulton street Friend: then i didnt turn Friend: then eastern parkway seduced me Friend: and then i found myself in a marshland. then i decided i wanted a shishkebob JeffreyBeaumont: plenty of flatheaded bros to speak russian to Friend: it was all quite logical Friend: funny thing is Friend: (and i probably shouldnt share this) Friend: but i bought a baltika when i got there Friend: and took it to the beach Friend: and just as i sat down and wrestled the cap off with my key Friend: i realized i had to pee so badly Friend: but did not want to leave my spot Friend: and my beer Friend: i tried to hold it Friend: only then i realized even grown ups have to learn lessons sometimes Friend: so after a drying period and a throwing my underwear away in a public bathroom. i kept to myself ... Friend: needless to say i feel like summer is truly here. Friend: bikes and wetting myself! JeffreyBeaumont: ummm JeffreyBeaumont: Wait. JeffreyBeaumont: You actually wet your pants because you didn't feel like finding a bathroom?? JeffreyBeaumont: that's kind of amazing JeffreyBeaumont: i am simultaneously taken aback and thrilled all at once Friend: well i learned my lesson Friend: i thought i could transcend my desires Friend: and enjoy my damn beer without getting up Friend: can't have everything, right?
JeffreyBeaumont: this is like a confluence of the three worst people in basketball (according to Bill Simmons): "Isiah Thomas is actively seeking work again, and he spoke several weeks ago with Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling in a meeting arranged by current coach/general manager Mike Dunleavy, ESPN.com learned Wednesday."
hotdorknobs: good god
hotdorknobs: what a shit show
JeffreyBeaumont: just throw in pete babcock for consulting and you might have the most inept collection of front office non-talent ever
JeffreyBeaumont: it just seems too fucking horribly appropriate
JeffreyBeaumont: for the historically worst franchise in the NBA to hire (one of?) the worst GMs ever
JeffreyBeaumont: "to add another executive to the Los Angeles front office to alleviate some of Dunleavy's responsibilities in his dual role as coach and general manager."
hotdorknobs: SPREAD THE SUCK AROUND
JeffreyBeaumont: All they gotta do is trade Baron Davis and Marcus Camby away for Jerome James and Jamal Crawford and sign Marbury to a max contract and they will have literally the worst team in the history of the NBA.
JeffreyBeaumont: YES, EVEN WORSE THAN THE '07-'08 KNICKS.
e144: man in other news my friend G, who is in her 40s and has been a lesbian for pretty much her whole adult life heard from this guy she dated in high school and briefly after college who still wants to get with her. e144: he says "tell the other lovers to decamp" and "i think you voodooed me" but hasn't seen her since 1989. he found her on the college library website. e144: she's tried to tell him she's gay e144: thank goodness berkeley is so far from poughkeepsie JeffreyBeaumont: dude if he's been waiting 20 years that's not a very far distance to travel for love e144: yeah, true i could see him marching into the library and then getting marched out by campus security
The waning Day 2 is coming to a close and Day 3 will begin in a few hours. So far ok.
What's noteworthy right now though is that I just watched the recent Herzog film Rescue Dawn and it is truly great. The story of this character, Dieter Dengler, a Navy pilot who is shot down and captured in Vietnam in '65, is a totally insane one... but then on top of that, it was also a little crazy to spend two hours watching a story about starving soldiers. Those balls of rice. God.
You should watch [url=http://l.yimg.com/img.movies.yahoo.com/ymv/us/img/hv/photo/movie_pix/paramount_classics/the_machinist/christian_bale/machinist3.jpg]The Machinist[/url] next
Dear lord, watch this display of non-human CRAZINESS:
I am floored and speechless. This is just out of control, from LeBron's 55 point game--this is a stretch where LeBron scored 16 points in two minutes during an 18-4 Cavs run. The thing is, the shots he takes here.... are literally the most ridiculous selection of shots i've ever seen in my life. Like, so fucking bad and ugly that if he were anyone else in the NBA he'd prob get benched for taking shots like these... And some how he makes them ALL, except, most bizarrely, the two free throws he takes. The confidence he displays in throwing these shots up... it's like he just KNOWS that he's going to make 'em all in. And it looks like he's this guy.... but you know it's not the same kind of luck. Totally insane. This man. Insane.
My musical tastes have always been all over the map, but in the past year they've really been something else entirely. For most of my life I never felt inclined to be obsessive about particular tracks or artists--there was always so much music out there that it seems too easy to always listen to "something else". Something has clicked within me though in the last 12 months though that has lead me to great obsessions, over artists and individual tracks in particular. I haven't the time to name them all but "It's All Over Now," "Sea of Love," "Untitled 2," "Isolation," and, most recently, "Dreams" (in covers, not the original) have eaten my soul alive with their infectious goodness. And beyond the songs are a few "artists" whose tunes have rained down upon my brain like drizzling napalm over the past six months are Deerhunter/Atlas Sound, Lil Wayne, Nina Simone, 50s rock/60s soul, and--most curiously--Nine Inch Nails.
Deerhunter and Lil Wayne both came into my life in 2008 as new and previously unexplored artists who each share the talents of being both immensely creative and insanely prolific. Bradford Cox emits a nonending stream of albums, EPs, singles, "bonus projects" and internet-only nonsense under both Deerhunter and Atlas Sound outfits, and Lil Wayne drops a new mixtape more or less every time he sneezes. The quality control for both isn't amazing (Bradford sometimes too cute and boring; Wayne sometimes just terrible), but their genius is unquestionable and their tenacity unrivaled. Therefore, it's not too surprising how much these men have affected me, but that it took me so long to hear (and love) them.
The 50s rock/60s soul comes as a direct outcropping of Bradford's obsession with both of these musics, feeding my brain both with his covers of such songs as well as his constant discussions of them. Hearing swaying, swooning reverb guitar, or soulful paeans to a time forgotten make me well up into a ball of fake-nostalgic nothing. It's a kind of haunting empty reductiveness that makes me think of my childhood, my grandparents, David Lynch, and a time that I imagined once existed but never really did. Which is to say the same general "theme" of shit I've cared about for most of my life.
So that's all very sensible. But then we get to the outlier--NINE INCH NAILS. [Should I be writing that as "NINE INCH NAILS (!!!?!!?!)"?] Before Nine Inch Nails came into my life again this year, I last cared about them in 1997, when the soundtrack to David Lynch's Lost Highway came out and it not only featured the fantastic Nine Inch Nails "Perfect Drug" single, but was also entirely compiled carefully and lovingly by Trent Reznor as hands-down the best and creepiest "stands-on-its-own" movie soundtrack I've ever heard. Not just a collection of good or appropriate songs, but a disconcertingly spun web of malevolent sonic envelopement that matches perfectly the ghostly darkness and fear-driven disorientation of its cinematic twin. But I digress: because even then, in 1997, all the new music Nine Inch Nails fans got was this soundtrack, featuring one single Nine Inch Nails song. The last new NIN album to come out (not counting the reams of singles and remix collections) was the schoolmom-hating Downward Spiral in 1994, and the time that passed from '94-'97 was a pretty long stretch for a 15 year old boy. By the time Spiral sequel The Fragile dropped in '99 I had already moved too far on to even bother listening to it once.
I was pretty ok with this--the second half of the '90s saw a shittening** of both the power of Nine Inch Nails bombast as well as the status of Guru Reznor, who seemed to put more focus on being an alcoholic and helping to further the career of Marilyn Manson (and thus 1,000,000 shitty, terrible, derivative metal/nu-metal/rap-metal/stoner-metal bands popular only in the Midwest). Frankly, by 2001, liking--let alone stepping up for--Nine Inch Nails seemed almost embarrassing.
Flash forward many years to May 2008, when I got an email from a friend saying, "Hey dude, you might wanna check this out--Nine Inch Nails just released their first album for free, so grab it if you're interested." For whatever reason I went for it, and then waited three months before listening to the album for the first time, one late night coming home from work at 10pm in late summer. And BOOM. BOOM. BOOOOOOOOOOOM.
I cannot for the life of me explain it, but from the beginning drum thuds of first song "1,000,000" I was just blown away. I imagined in my head I would listen to half the album, maybe even only one or two songs, just a few times and then delete it. But instead what I heard was an intense, enrapturing rock and roll assault that left me begging for more.
It is clear that above all the success of this album, called The Slip, comes from its non-belabored immediacy. More than most "difficult artists" in the rock industry, Trent Reznor established a reputation over the years as having the Frank Zappa /Billy Corgan-esque maniacal obsession to detail while on an illusory quest for a kind of perverted perfection that would never be found. And frankly, the harder he tried, I think the more he struggled. The Slip just feels fast and fresh--yes, it's got the standard Reznor sonic sheen, but it feels gestational in a raw way that suits Reznor unbelievably well.
My only knock against The Slip, if I have any at all, is the fact that it's really more of an EP--six powerful, intense rock songs before suddenly collapsing into an "At The Heart of It All" / "The Beauty of Being Numb" quiet period into >> instrumental soundscape for 5minutes. The disc closes up with one more burner, but the tracks prior just don't rock enough and don't hit the astonishing heights of album highlights, "Discipline", "Echoplex," or "1,000,000". But honestly, this is all quibbling, and there's an even an argument for the slowdown inclusion as helping to supply evidence of "what a 40 minute distillation of everything Nine Inch Nails have done could be". I'm not saying it's bad or even disappointing, I'm just pointing out what isn't perfect.
And so my intense reaction to The Slip was such that it has now lead me running backward into the past, beginning first with Reznor's early 2008 double-disc album of shelved instrumentals Ghosts I-IV (ZZzzzzzz; see above) and continuing to 2007's Year Zero--which, after reading the Pitchfork and Allmusic Reviews, I was ready to love even more the The Slip. Sadly, Year Zero just isn't as good--a few good-to-great songs, some unmemorable fare, and a few clunkers--but I am at least, in this still-Slip adled phase, able to enjoy it as the next best thing to The Album I Really Want to Hear. Then, just last week I added the Year Zero remix album Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D (umm yeah) to the feedbag and while it too is inconsistent, it contains a few tracks even more inspired than the source material, namely two remixes by--of all people--the Kronos Quartet and German experimental artist Fennesz. These two tracks, particularly the latter, make me excited for post-Slip future that I am already praying might come.
So yeah, what the fuck?? This is probably one of the last musical developments I would have expected to have experienced in 2008. But in a bizarre way, I feel like Trent has helped blow the doors off my musical shack and I feel more ready and willing than in many years to seek out and slurp out the most intense and experimental sonic undertakings I can find. I feel a hunger for musical discovery that I haven't felt in probably five years, since I had my experimental electronics radio show in college (RIP, Postmodern Glitch) and i thirsted after new sounds each and every week. And it feels FUCKING GREAT.
Hilarious endpoint for tonight's musings: my boss is about to start doing a media industry radio podcast, and I have been tasked as both producer of the show as well as creator of a theme song. I went down to our radio booth with our engineer and combed through the mess of free-rights audio loops in our library and put together a couple of samples, a downbeat jazz bit (which I thought was both talk-radio and age appropriate) and a second more upbeat 60s sounding funk guitar bit. Neither of them felt quite right to me and I had a feeling they wouldn't feel right to him either... and sure enough, they didn't. He said to me, "Look, I just want something edgier, more contemporary. Rocking. Like AC/DC maybe." And so I just said, Ok, fuck it: "Max, this is what I'd use if i were making a theme for my own radioshow" and proceeded to lay down the intro to "1,000,000"... and he absolutely loved it. I then cut the drums in half, looped the guitar riff, and dropped in the vocal parts and BOOM, there was our show intro, much to my astonishment and amusement. And best of all the song (and album) was released under a under a "Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial share-alike license," so I can use it royalty-free in any way I want. Totally fucking crazy!
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Anyway, that's enough for now. I leave you with the following mp3s for your enjoyment and experiential knowledge-gaining:
I'm all about freedom of the press n' shit and Americans having a good time, but Halloween is where you sometimes have to say, Do we draw the line here? Or at least, if you're not a hateful dick, is there anything fun about doing this?
And yes, I did literally run off the train after he saw me attempting to discreetly snap this on my iphone.
GET BEHIND ME DEAD MAN
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